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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Motown Shakedown
A few months after he graduated from Wesleyan University in 2012, Max Nussenbaum landed a job at a tech startup in Detroit. Within a year, he and some friends had bought a run-down house. By the spring of 2014, he had a startup under his belt: Castle, an app for ...

A Study in Total Depravity
Elite higher education in America has long been a Veblen good—a commodity that obeys few, if any, conventional laws of economic activity. In some cases (chiefly among the children of the serene professional elders perusing the Sunday New York Times), the higher the sticker ...

Splurge and Purge
Forever 21 stands on the south side of Union Square in New York, just around the corner from my office. I see teenagers, working women, families, and dudes shopping for clothing there at all hours of the day, buying up floral maxi dresses, faux leather and shearling jackets, and ...

Dickheads
Some people (me, for instance) put a great deal of energy into organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic power? It’s not as if other parts of a formal suit—white shirts, ...

Idle Threads
BOOKS REVIEWED Women in Clothes, by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, Blue Rider Press, $30 Worn Stories, by Emily Spivack, Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95 Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades ...

Three Strikes! [1]
© Katherine Streeter I made nice.[2] It didn’t work. Women are still oppressed, men still running the show. They’re still running around raping, killing, and maiming women—raping, killing, and maiming children too (which is really just another way of ...

Purple Reign
When the great granddaddy of opinion journals, The New Republic, abruptly vanished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and management theory last winter, establishment journalists rent their garments and gnashed their teeth in horror. “The promise of American life has been ...

VCs Take the Media
Alex Blumberg wanted to start a business. The veteran radio producer had established himself with such prestige radio programs as This American Life and Planet Money. But in 2014 he decided he was ready to strike out on his own—to build a podcasting network featuring several ...

The Taming of Tech Criticism
BOOK REVIEWED The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, $26.95 What does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question seems easy: to be a technology critic in America now is to ...

Buffalo Exchange
During the winter of 2014, at roughly the same time, two projects laying claim to the future were unveiled in Buffalo, New York. One was Buffalo State College’s proposal to offer the world’s first PhD program in Creativity Studies. The other was a state plan to build ...